What Docs counts
The Word count dialog reports pages, words, characters and characters excluding spaces for the whole document or for selected text. Body text, headings, lists and tables count. Headers and footers are not included. An option labelled “Include footnotes” lets you count them, and another keeps a running word count on screen as you type.
Where Docs differs from Word
The largest difference is the em dash. Word joins words connected by an unspaced em dash into one token, while Docs generally counts them as two words. Heavy users of em dashes will see a higher total in Docs than in Word. Differences with symbols and spaced dashes also appear. Over a long document the gap is small but can matter near a limit. See How Microsoft Word Counts Words for Word’s side of this comparison.
Other points
- Hyphenated words count as one in both.
- Numbers count as words; see Do Numbers Count as Words?.
- Selecting text shows the count for the selection.
- Documents imported from Word may shift slightly because of conversion.
Matching Docs with this counter
WordCounter.pk counts an em dash as a separator, like Docs, and requires a letter or digit in a word, so standalone symbols do not count. For ordinary text the totals will agree closely. If your submission portal uses its own counter, trust that figure. To learn how to open the dialog, see How to Count Words in Google Docs; to understand our approach, see How Word Count Is Calculated.
Try it yourself
Put the numbers above to work with these free tools:
Frequently asked questions
Does Google Docs count words in footnotes?
Only if you tick Include footnotes in the dialog.
Why is my Docs count higher than Word’s?
Em dashes without spaces are the usual cause.
Does Docs count words in headers?
No.